The First Fagin

Poorer imitation ... Alec Guinness as Fagin, in the 1948 film version of Oliver Twist.

THE FIRST FAGINThe True Story of Ikey SolomonBy Judith Sackville-O'DonnellAcland Press, 176pp, $25

Judith Sackville-O'Donnell intends to rescue "the Prince of Fences", Isaac Solomon, from the shadow of the creepy, villainous Fagin of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and from the more recent clutches of Bryce Courtenay's The Potato Factory. With verve in the telling, and research lightly worn, she fashions if not the whole truth then a complicated version of Solomon's life that challenges preconceptions.

Dickens must have known his story, but the real Ikey Solomon (Sackville-O'Donnell ditches the given name Isaac for the familiar, insulting diminutive) was much richer and more successful than Fagin.

Nor was he a corrupter of children. An East End Jew, he worked out of a shop in Spitalfields. His family and that of his long-loved wife, Ann, lived in the neighbourhood. Ikey's father was a receiver. Crime was in the family.

Sackville-O'Donnell is especially illuminating on the technical aspects of Ikey's trade - the melting down of silver, thieving for the insurance money, remodelling stolen watches for resale. She shows as well how a hardly professional legal system found it difficult to bring Ikey to conviction. In one celebrated episode in 1827 he escaped from dopey, or doped, Newgate turnkeys and made his way to America.

Wife Ann was in the authorities' sights now. Before long she was convicted of being in possession of stolen property and was transported to Van Diemen's Land. When he heard of this, Solomon - in an act either gallant or quixotic - took ship for the prison island to be with her, joining the line of criminal celebrities who would help to make its reputation.

Now the Solomon story shifts towards farce. It was a matter of hours before convicts and constables recognised the famous London fence as he strolled the streets of Hobart. But there was no warrant for his arrest, nothing to stop him opening a tobacconist-cum-general store in Elizabeth Street. When eventually he was arrested and, in a Dickensian circumlocution, sent back to the Old Bailey for trial in 1830, Solomon found himself convicted - and returned to Van Diemen's Land.

His life there witnessed a steady decline from the infamy that he had enjoyed in England. Solomon became an inveterate petitioner of governors and was estranged from his wife. Nonetheless, Sackville-O'Donnell emphasises "the strange complexity of his personality,

the daring and boldness of his exploits and escapades, and his heroic and romantic arrival in Van Diemen's Land".

She judges that had Ikey been an Irishman, a sportsman or a horse - rather than a Jew - he would have been given the historical recognition, and the patina of legend, that he deserved. At least The First Fagin has offered Ikey Solomon the chance of a second, belated season of renown.

Peter Pierce is professor of Australian literature at James Cook University, Queensland.